Survey Mode - Limited transmit power?

Mankiki
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Survey Mode - Limited transmit power?

Hi together, I'm starting my first site survey with a MR42 meraki access point, which I'm configuring in survey mode right now. I'd like to set both radios to a fixed value of 15 dBm, which is possible and no problem. When I configured these values, I recognized that the upper limit is 15 dBm for 2.4 GHz and 17 dBm for 5 GHz. Since the country code of my Meraki site is DE (germany), the upper limit should be higher (20 dBm for 2.4 GHz and 20 dBm for 5GHz UNII-1 without TPC, 30 dBm for UNII-2 and UNII-2 Extended). Could someone tell me if these values are also the upper limit for the APs if they are running in an infrastructure later? Is this probably just a limit for the survey mode, helping the admin to choose meaningful values? I want to be sure that there is enough room for the AP to increase the transmit power, when a neighbor AP will shutdown. Thanks a lot and best regards.
3 REPLIES 3
NolanHerring
Kind of a big deal

Since your ETSI, the 20dBm value isn't TX power, it should be EIRP (like 95% certain lol).

Since the MR42 has a 5.5dBi antenna, your actual max TX power is going to rest around that 15dBm value that your hitting.
Nolan Herring | nolanwifi.com
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Both Cisco and Meraki AP's display their power level as being the IR, not the EIRP.

So you can only set your power level up to max EIRP minus antenna gain.
So for 2.4 usually for most Meraki AP's you'll be around max 14 to 15 dBm.

However I have found that survey mode does not always take this into account.

 

Also Survey mode is very buggy if you're not using an MR33.
Alot of AP's in survey mode suddenly start claiming they never connected to the cloud and disallow you to change the config or they simply crash.

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